At Turbonomic Ben ensures we continue to deliver unique value in our customers' hybrid cloud environments. He decided to join Turbonomic after spending too much time watching dev blame ops and ops blame dev while users still did not get the experience they wanted. Ben has over 15 year of experience in the enterprise software space first as developer and later as a product manager.

Optimizing the Storage beneath the Virtualization Layer

We have come a long way with Virtualization adoption in the past few years, with VMware reporting at VMworld 2012 that close to 60% of workloads have been virtualized. Mission critical IO intensive applications such as CRM, ERP, and database heavy applications still lag this significantly however. In a recent survey, it was reported that storage is accounting for approximately 25% of virtualization budgets, and that high storage costs and performance problems were identified by approximately half of respondents as the two dominant reasons holding up the virtualization of these mission critical IO intensive apps.

Ensuring storage IO performance to virtualized workloads remains a consistent top cause of virtualization performance issues, with many having learned first hand of application performance problems relating to storage issues, resulting in a lack of confidence in the ability to virtualize the most IO intensive applications. This is leading to missed opportunities to significantly reduce compute service cost and increase agility to the business. The reality is that storage performance problems are also leading to significant storage overprovisioning of both IO and disk capacity, further exacerbating the storage cost problem. Storage domain technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication and compression compound these challenges by obfuscating the available underlying storage space, making it difficult to maximize storage space efficiency and manage risk.

In many cases, the technology teams and operational processes supporting virtualization and storage are fragmented, as are the tools being used to manage these domains, making it difficult to understand the key dependencies between them and holistically control them in an optimally efficient and performant state.

With the recent 4.0 release of VMTurbo Operations Manager – VMTurbo is introducing the Storage Extension to tackle these problems – allowing Enterprises and Service Providers to significantly reduce their infrastructure and operational costs, assure application performance, and virtualize mission critical IO intensive applications with confidence.

With the VMTurbo storage extension, the invisible hand of the VMTurbo datacenter marketplace has been extended into the storage beneath the virtualization layer, driving storage resource allocation decisions that optimize efficiency and performance of the storage infrastructure and assure performance of hosted workloads, all in context of the virtualization layer above. A unified, holistic and non-fragmented approach to optimizing and controlling the virtualization and storage layers is critical in achieving the benefits described above.